ROCKFORD - Her friends went to the airport. Robin Gausebeck went to freshman biology class.

It was Feb. 7, 1964.

It's the day The Beatles got off a Pan Am flight at Kennedy Airport in New York.

"A lot of my friends went," said Gausebeck, who was 14 and grew up on the south shore of Long Island a mile from the airport. "They got permission from their parents to skip school. My parents wouldn't let me."

Beatlemania had arrived in the U.S.

Nothing would be the same.

"Landing on American shores on February 7, 1964, they literally stood the world of pop culture on its head, setting the musical agenda for the remainder of the decade," reads a band profile on the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website.

Gausebeck said that while nearly everybody in America had heard about the band, she and her friends considered their arrival in New York a local event.

The Beatles would play The Ed Sullivan Show two nights later in a historic, and hysteric, TV event that drew 73 million viewers - a record at the time.

While she didn't make it to the airport, The Beatles had an immediate impact on Gausebeck. She became a fan.

"I have all the albums," she said, and a couple of bootlegs.

It's the music her children learned because it was on at home and in the car, Gausebeck said.

And while she missed the event that day in 1964, she didn't miss the movement.

"Days after they landed here, I did talk my mother into taking me to the beauty parlor so I could get a Beatles haircut," she said.